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Guy Kawasaki Is No Google Whore

Guy Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm and a columnist for Forbes.com. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. where he was one of the individuals responsible for the success of the Macintosh computer.

Guy is the author of eight books including The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. He has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

Guy Kawasaki is seen as a captain of industry and master of the business world. Therefore, when he started his blog a year ago, everyone assumed it would get huge (true, #45 on Technorati) and make a lot of money. The make a lot of money part hasn’t panned out as far as Google AdSense was concern. Nearly 2.5 million page views later, Mr. Kawasaki made just $3,350 from Google AdSense, or $279.16 a month.

No one who knows even a little bit about AdSense optimization would be shocked that Guy Kawasaki made so little from Google. His ad placements were just plain bad. However, because this is Mr. Guy Kawasaki, many bloggers (here, here and here just to name a few) are using Mr. Kawasaki’s AdSense failure as proof that Google doesn’t work. Even CNN got in on the act.

How can a blog with 30,000 readers per day make only $279.00 per month with AdSense? The answer is simple. Over 22,000 readers never visit the blog – they read it by RSS (no Google ads there). The remaining readers who do visit the blog don’t click on the Google ads because it’s poorly optimized.

Mr. Kawasaki never cared about the Google ads. They were slapped on without thought or consideration. His blog wasn’t made to promote Google. It was made to promote Guy Kawasaki, his speaking engagements, and his books. Google was an afterthought.

Too many bloggers think all one needs to do is set up a blog, slap on some Google ads, and then watch the money roll in. It doesn’t work that way and it never will. Even if your name is Guy Kawasaki, you still need to tweak the ads if you want to make serious money from them.

I guess I shouldn’t complain about bloggers calling AdSense a failure. It just means more money for me.

It is interesting to see how quickly people will jump on and say that Adsense doesn’t work and it is nearly impossible to earn real money.

While I have yet to earn anything substantial, I know it can be done and I continue to work towards the proper blend of quality content and high volumes of traffic to produce my own earnings.

As you mention, it seems many people think all that stands between them and their fortunes is a quickly made page with Adsense units slapped up. This can be good for those of us that know better.

Speaking of sites and layouts, I’m looking to change my site around and really like the theme you use here John. I’m just hesitant to use it right now as I don’t want to become a John Chow Whore and completely try to mimic your success.

Wow, I guess it’s just like a total sideline for Guy, but still – it pains me to see such a volume of traffic not directly monetized, whether or not it’s building up other longterm monetization potential as is most likely the case here.

I agree it’s amusing that a lot of times people do jump on the “teh google sux” bandwagon. But you’re right, just means more ad inventory for us. Although, if its potential advertisers reading that sort of thing and getting turned off advertising on Google that can impact publishers longterm as well.

I, for one, can say that ad placement and implementation goes a really long way. I’ve had my blog up since March 2006 and made next to nothing for the first many months. Then I started pushing ad box to the right witn my first paragraph wrapping around it (instead of first paragraph, followed by ad box, followed by second paragraph). Then I removed the ad box border and changed the color scheme to better blend in with the page. Voila, I started to actually get some clicks. I’m still far from actually making any real money, but an extra 15 cents a day is better than nothing at all.

I read this data a few days back on his blog (via RSS) and now on reading your note I think that he should not even be putting up Google Ads on his blog.

I am also a little surprised that Google has left it as it is. Is it not in their interest also that they do some follow up to ensure that he does it right (if he wants to have Google Ads on his blog) ?

Question for John and anyone else who knows – I am still new to web publishing and only have 1 site so far but do plan on developing more. Would you recommend publishing all these sites and signing up for Ad Networks as myself or creating an LLC and conducting all this business as the LLC? (So far this is only a side thing for me but I am dedicating a lot of hours per day to it.) Thanks.

I had a comment on my blog to do pretty much the same thing. Remove the border and follow the color scheme of my links to the ads. I also added a URL channel to keep track of what is happening with the ads but this I’ll have to fine tune.

As a few of you know I don’t use WordPress or any pre-made script. Yes it looks like WordPress a bit but its all custom. Though I am playing with the ad block setups to see where for my site they might be the best.

John I noticed you don’t use a skyscraper ad anywhere here, would you advice I removed mine and used it as either a leader board or anothe 250×250 else where?

Raghu, re: what options do bloggers have to try and keep people coming to the blog vs. just reading the RSS feeds, one possibility is to only publish excerpts in your RSS feed as opposed to the full article.

Also, I believe John has been using FeedBurner ads in the RSS feed and those are making him money that way as well.

I agree with you John, he wants people to read his articles to promote his business, not to click ads. Guy himself didn’t really bash AdSense, but those follow up blogs were really uncalled for and ignorant in my honest opinion.

I was intrigued by the FeedBlitz product mentioned in the article. John, do you think you can write an article on email blog subscribers, and potential products to support this endeavour?

To be clear, I wasn’t using Kawasaki’s post as ‘proof that Google doesn’t work’. In fact, I wrote and published my post before becoming aware of Anderson’s post or Kawasaki’s (hence the use of the term ‘update’ in my post). In addition, if you read my post, it states quite clearly that one can’t draw any real conclusions from the data that I had, by that time, gathered.

I dont think people should be using guy’s statistics in a negative manner to prove adsense is not credible for all sites.Ofcourse certain advertising networks do not work in sites varying in topics and such forth but guy has stated that his interest in adsense can be simply described as being experimental.

Just making my ads on my own site blend in better, and putting the ads in the key areas made my adsense totals go up a lot. It’s funny how little things can really effect how much you make with adsense. I’m starting to think that using feedburner is counter productive.

John Chow said… “Mr. Kawasaki never cared about the Google ads. They were slapped on without thought or consideration… Too many bloggers think all one needs to do is set up a blog, slap on some Google ads, and then watch the money roll in. It doesn’t work that way and it never will. Even if your name is Guy Kawasaki, you still need to tweak the ads if you want to make serious money from them.”

We completely agree John. The problem with that statement is that Technorati says there at 55 million blogs, and I think we can both agree that 99.5% or more of those blogs are started by “people who just want to write”, not people who want to make money.

Therefore, to assume that those same people are going to be forward enough to optimize Adsense, even if they wanted to (which they really don’t)… is to assume wrong.

Our statements stand true… Adsense does not work “out of the box” for the VAST majority of bloggers… not pro bloggers… REAL bloggers.

That’s the argument, not that Adsense doesn’t work at all, that Adsense doesn’t work for the vast majority, and never will without optimization, and as I mentioned, those bloggers don’t want to optimize, or care to ever learn how.

I disagree on the figure, of 99.5% bloggers are in it just to write. I think its substantially lower, there are a ton of greedy people out there. Figures aside, nothing will work to its greatest potential without proper application. Its like throwing your money in a random bank account and expecting to make 30% annual returns. Its not going to happen.

Yeah, sorry you haven’t had a conversion yet. I’ll take a look at your blog if you wish and see if we can improve your placements? Contact me at info at blogkits dot com with your URL. Unfortunately, it’s not going to work right away for everyone, although it is working for lots of others, and others not. Just the name of the game.

@Stew,

I’ve logged years of research from thousands of bloggers to come to those conclusions, so I don’t make those claims “will nilly” 🙂 Don’t overestimate bloggers. The VAST majority could care less about money.

"How I Went From Zero to Over $100,000 a Month"

The Original Dot Com Mogul

John Chow, a damn fine person, friend of the community, Ultimate Fighting Championship contestant, member of the Save the Whales Foundation, the man who controls the black market on baby seal pelts and member of the probably yo’ daddy foundation...

John Chow rocketed onto the blogging scene when he showed the income power of blogging by taking his blog from making zero to over $40,000 per month in just two years.